Lauren Rivera

Thank you for the shoutout, Jen!

If you haven't read Estela Diaz and Lauren Rivera's excellent paper on how private schools manage kids with disabilities, you're missing out.

LMM framing is that parents will choose schools for their children. That is absolutely false. Private schools will choose their kids, based on criteria that would mangle your brain.

Trust me, I've read hundreds of private school applications. Mind blowing stuff.

100 percent. And they explicitly exclude children they believe are neurodivergent or have any type of disability.
urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Congratulations!!

The monitor or the espresso? ;-)

And private schools can (and do) refuse to educated disabled or neurodivergent children

Deaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH.

Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH.

HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH.

99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH.

Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.

This is incredibly cool: if you search for a condition that’s affected your family, the site returns stats on how much NIH has done for that disease, *and* a contact form for reaching out to tell your Members of Congress why you want to see them defend NIH.

Pass it on!

Guys, I love all of you, but the answer to RFK, Jr. is not that autistic adults hold jobs, pay taxes, and get laid, it's that everyone deserves to live even if they can't work, pay taxes, or get laid.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss:

Australia 0
Canada 0
Denmark 0
Finland 0
France 0
Germany 0
Iceland 0
Ireland 0
Italy 0
Japan 0
Netherlands 0
Norway 0
Portugal 0
Spain 0
Sweden 0
UK 0
United States 530,000

There’s a lesson there.

Sharing an ungated version of a paper I recently published on private school early childhood admissions urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Thank you so much for the shoutout @katemcnamara.bsky.social!

Congratulations! Looking forward to reading!!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

While elite private schools do not (yet) require biomedical specimens as part of their assessments, their early childhood admissions practices—which essentialize merit and present some children’s bodies and minds as more or less intrinsically wired for success—share some concerning similarities.

13 years ago @npr.org ran a satire for April Fools announcing that an elite NYC preschool had begun to require prenatal DNA samples as part of its application process. Instead of backlash, the piece inspired affluent parents to inquire from their obstetricians where they could obtain such samples.

We argue that these schools' admissions practices represent a case of essentializing merit, in which gatekeepers construct merit as an intrinsic rather than achieved property of individuals, an approach that is gaining traction in other elite contexts, but has troubling implications for disability.

Prior work has discussed how in every era, elite private schools maintain high status by identifying an outgroup against which they define themselves; our research suggests that, at least in the context of early childhood programs, disabled children are that contemporary outgroup.

Seeking metrics they believed could not be “gamed” by affluent parents, they turned inward, looking for markers they believed were intrinsic markers of children’s underlying worth. But in doing so, they espoused evaluative logics that bear a striking resemblance to ideas from the eugenics movement.

Why did they do this? In a highly competitive admissions process, they believed screening on disability status was a fair and legitimate way of evaluating children who were too young to have established academic or extracurricular records to evaluate.

How do the most elite US private schools, which serve as Ivy League feeders, select their youngest members? In a new ASR article w/ @estelabdiaz.bsky.social, we show that schools explicitly design their early childhood admissions practices to identify—and exclude—disabled or neurodivergent children🧵

Thank you for writing this important piece!

Medicaid Is a Middle-Class Benefit. Here’s What to Know. If you have a parent short on savings, a disabled adult child or a minor with special needs, Medicaid may be your backstop. Plenty of people are unaware.

I will never stop trying to get people to care about Medicaid. And if you're on it -- or are close to someone who is (and LOTS of more affluent people do) -- please help. My column for the weekend. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/y...

Medicaid goes by many names. Will Americans realize if it gets cut? States, which administer federal Medicaid funds, often change the name of the program to get more people to sign up. Studies find this causes confusion about who benefits from the program.

For everyone following this thread, check out this great piece by @jannaherron.bsky.social
finance.yahoo.com/news/medicai...

@jannaherron.bsky.social thank you so much for writing this important piece!

Medicaid goes by many names. Will Americans realize if it gets cut? States, which administer federal Medicaid funds, often change the name of the program to get more people to sign up. Studies find this causes confusion about who benefits from the program.

As Medicaid cuts become a possibility, it's key to understand the scope of the program and its many names. H/t to @jessicacalarco.bsky.social and @larivera.bsky.social for the idea and to Melissa Hafner at @airinforms.bsky.social for further context.

finance.yahoo.com/news/medicai...

Thank you for this! My understanding is MinnesotaCare does receive Medicaid funds (www.cms.gov/newsroom/pre...)

Washington: Apple Health
Washington D.C. : Healthy Families
West Virginia : Medicaid
Wisconsin: Forward Health, BadgerCare
Wyoming: Equality Care

Thank you @lisalightner.bsky.social and A Day in Our Shoes for this list

Oklahoma: SoonerCare
Oregon: Oregon Health Plan (OHP)
Pennsylvania: Medical Assistance (MA)
Rhode Island: RI Medical Assistance Program
South Carolina: Healthy Connections
South Dakota: Medicaid
Tennessee: TennCare
Texas: STAR+PLUS
Utah: Medicaid
Vermont: Green Mountain Care
Virginia: Cardinal Care